The case for educational blogging part 1

Its starting, the students are starting to stir…
I noticed a post on our internal newsgroups today, i have omitted some items for speed and convence of this blog

Hello CNDI / CHIRP people,
Just had a fantastic idea which i think might improve
convergence between departments and collaborative working
between students here at college.
Many departments require or reccommend that students keep a
journal or research log of their work… a great idea for
sorting ideas, have been keeping a paper based one for ages.
Howeverf, keeping a notebook of things which intereset you
seems fairly insular, and does not encourage interaction
between students with similar research interests.
Therefore, don't you think it would be cool to set up aweblog server, upon which students could enter their
research sources and thoughts on relevant subjects onto
their blog, which is fully searchable, and available for
everyone at the college to see? that way, if someone is
researching the Bauhaus, for instance, they could search the
blogs for it, and share their research sources with other
students. also, for instance, if a Graphics student was
researching the work of Peter Saville, and a Fashion
student was researching his influence on fashion promotion,
the two could get in touch and share information easily.
Do you think this is a good idea? obviously there would be
some issues concerning plaigarism, but none more so than two
students discussing work offline. Should be technically
feasible too, applications such as Movable Type should make it
fairly simple (which is more than can be said for the video
over IP idea i posted last term)
see ya,
Tim

Great piece which made me think good and hard
Some extracts…
It made me think of weblogs. Initially, weblogs caught on with geeks and kids. These geeks and kids weren't at all interested in ROI, knowledge management, or even in defining what it was they were doing.